


Summer Sakura

by InkfaceFahz



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Air travel, Airplanes, Business Trips, Dissatisfaction, Intimacy, M/M, New Mexico, Plants, Quarter-Life Crisis, Seasons, Sickfic, Slightly More Canon Compliant Maybe, The Cousins Pocket Universe, Time And The Angst of Time, Unfortunately; LAX, Unfortunately; Portland, Vignettes that Rhyme Metaphorically, alcohol use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:40:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24537139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkfaceFahz/pseuds/InkfaceFahz
Summary: Sometimes you can get by with the idea of a plant and a memory of an embrace to carry your home in your heart through continents and years.Sometimes you can't; Yeah, it's hardy, but it still needs water.
Relationships: Moniwa Kaname/Ushijima Wakatoshi
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	Summer Sakura

Moniwa Kaname doesn't dislike the simple, sugary sweets of a holiday, per se. It’s more like he can live without them. Yet when he travels for work, those odd trips where hours of engineering and design work becomes -- at best -- minutes of explanation to sportswear company’s executive officers, he keeps finding himself in the central display of a pharmacy, awash in ill fluorescent, which glints unpleasantly off the clear cellophane containing distinctly different products of the season, oblong milky chocolate to crack the shell of on ones teeth, a parade of unusual edible animals, but across many cities outside Japan, never the soft, familiar blossoms.

He likes the cherry blossom festival, for any common reason anyone would find the blooms lovely, but also because it was reassuring, it was a reliable unit of measurement; It has always meant he was entering a new grade, that he had made it through the winter along with the trees, and they got to briefly shine before the world went back to ignoring their unadorned, unremarkable existence. 

The 18th year, the blossoms appearance marked a new era, carpeting them as his head leaned on broad shoulders, quietly murmuring, stealing the rice flour that stuck to Wakatoshi’s lips with a kiss, that left them both embarrassed. Each spring through Kaname's time university, Wakatoshi excused himself from practice for a weekend, a rebuttal to his reputation as utterly single minded on his volleyball career, and came home to the grove and to the boy who rubbed his cheek and held him close and found comfortable silence together. Years on, they moved to Tokyo, and Kaname had an anti-anxiety medication now, that the appearance from its burial chamber of a vanity drawer meant one thing: Another trip to Narita Airport. Wakatoshi’s teammates sometimes watched in the locker room as he sat and decrypted the mysterious app interface that tracked his partner’s plane to America, Germany, Brazil, for a few days or weeks, returning more frequently with stylish, or outlandish, compensated products from companies, and occasionally rather luxury gifts -- bottles of liquor, frequent, but also the kind of housewares or decorations that felt more to his estranged mother’s taste, carrying a discouraging aura. Objects to own because people would see you own them, like her immaculate hand-woven wardrobe, beautiful vases to contain things now dead, or a son who was supposed to marry a girl his grandmother had suggested sometime when they both still played with stuffed toys. The gifts felt an odd fit in his boyfriend’s unusual mannerisms of aesthetic practicality. They lived in their packaging, relatively luxurious in and of itself usually, in the cabinets. 

“The artist collaborating spoke Japanese, he invited me out to see the city,” Kaname would carefully add whatever had been gifted in the box to a growing stack, laughing a little. “They were friendly, but man, they got me to do a couple too many shots.” 

“Don’t worry, I didn’t get into any trouble.” Then he’d wash off his hands, lean into Wakatoshi, and ask, 

“Are the blossoms close to peak in Ueno park?” 

And Wakatoshi knows Kaname’s analytical mind already knew the answer as they held each other, Wakatoshi’s quietest tone, thickened honey, murmuring  _ Just in time. You always know. _

And Kaname replies  _ I try to do my best.  _

Both do their best. Wakatoshi can’t help but do it, though he has never been the one to brag about it, and Kaname practically blossoms himself, after visiting places over a world away for all Wakatoshi knew of them -- once the Narita hurdle has been passed through with his little green tablets that tell his body when not to breathe quite so fast. He talks about athletes from sports J-League star Ushijima didn’t even know, of what he thinks of the fabrics wrapped around his engineering, wondering perhaps his now-friend from the other local public high school back home could get a contract for a line and bring Japanese textiles to the brands that outfit professional players before one takes the other’s hand and the comfort shifts. Wakatoshi loves their silence together, but after so many years and so many trips he begins the routine of turning his cellphone to sleep mode until it's not quite time for Kaname to come back to solid ground, just in case he needs to call earlier than they planned. Wakatoshi’s work has been routine for years -- practice, play, win or lose -- , but he’s changed his background to a photo of Kaname, which catches the attention of his teammates, but little, if any, comment, except two of his peers in the organization exchanging a look, as if they’re curious. Periodically, he checks what time it is in another life, excuses himself, and the smile that his family never owned lights up a looking glass into a corporate-billed hotel room, its neutral tranquility already turned to a whirlwind of Kaname’s disorganized ways of being, as if he would ever thoroughly eradicate those habits before dropping the keycard in the slot. He’s barely dressed under the blankets, on the mattress, in the diffuse light of another city. It feels like another planet that’s abducted his Kaname.

“Wake you?” 

“No -- but if I fall asleep, good night.” Kaname whispers to the glow of a screen that lights his face up like a ghost, sideways and settled into the distant comfort of a transient bed. He thinks to himself how much nicer all this space to stretch out on would be if it had Wakatoshi on it. 

“Good morning,” the voice so deep, so lovely, plays along with the game, before introducing his own literalism back into their rapport. “Almost dinner here, actually, so I guess it is actually morning, technically, for you,” he pedantically self-corrects. The ghost giggles to catch flashes of a grin. 

“Good morning, of course.”

“How was the flight?” 

The face with one cheek squished against a dense pillow glances up and to the side. “Oh, fine…”

Wakatoshi remains silent, his most useful tool with an evasive Kaname. He hates discussing his anxiety, insisting that he would make it more real and it doesn't deserve that power. So it tends to linger instead, the insubstantial air of dread impossible to sterilize from his mind. 

“We had turbulence landing, don’t worry, it’s normal. How’s your team?” 

“We’re in fine form. I still would like you to come to a game.” 

“I might…” 

"When are you, again, precisely?" He shifts gears, having found somewhere in the lockers to sit by himself instead of pacing on a video call. Kaname blinks and says,  _ Portland.  _ He was much more worldly, in some ways, than Wakatoshi, who could only recall that was the same time zone as California. When he asked his partner’s mother about this once, she suggested that he took after his aunt, the second of three sisters; a middle child who conducted themself like the eldest, a precocious sense of responsibility that was fleeting as a blossom as it was necessary, and one day found themself comfortable that they could leave home, absolutely captivated by what they found outside it. __ Comfortable that they would come back home. Wakatoshi thinks later that she added this in an attempt to reassure him that Kaname wouldn't disappear someday. Maybe it was to reassure herself. Wakatoshi had not ever met the second sister; his romance with Kaname still beginning to bud when she passed away. Unlike Kaname's clockwork anxiety reliable as any machine well tended to with the right tools, Wakatoshi only feels it randomly, when he is lucky enough to just barely keep his head and avoid drowning in it. It is rare.

“So is it very early or very late?” 

“Hm… not quite threeee hours after midnight,” he yawns, rolling over and stretching and digitally dragging Wakatoshi with him, until he can see Kaname’s unusually-heavy-lidded gaze from a vantage point that he usually only got when his hold around him was tight, but gentle, not the grip around the touchscreen phone Kaname finally convinced him to to replace his high school phone with. “So I’d say it’s not quite either.” 3 or 4 am had become one of his favorite times of day, liminal with just enough space and time for the two of them. 

“I have an excuse, customs took a while,” he adds hesitantly. 

“When’s your meeting in the morning, though?” 

Scattered embarrassment quirks the corner of Kaname’s mouth, brow… he searches for an obscured answer.

“10:15”, he finally admits, aware his body would be expecting to sleep .

“Will you be okay?” The echoes of a world apart crackle when Kaname laughs. 

“It’s not a formal meeting… its a brunch… some restaurant advertised in a tourism pamphlet at the airport. Fancy fusion small plates such-and-such. It’ll be fine. All the Americans from the corporate office will assume I get sloshed on a single drink and then overindulge themselves, so while they're hungover I’ll actually get to speak to the other global team designers and contractors instead of the marketers,” he rattles this prediction so casually. “Then the rest of the trip the workers from their headquarters will be drinking green smoothies while asking me questions I’m not sure they’ll understand the meaning of, much less my own comprehension. It’s hearing from people like the South American and Russian textile designers what about their patterns they designed to be highlighted by the garment, what other engineers have been doing with the soles... “ he yawns the point of his sentence into oblivion, but Wakatoshi knows its from pure exhaustion, because Wakatoshi likes to hear him speak about his work so much. It seems more and more that his interest had expanded beyond this contributions to testing materials and designs for performance.

“... I just think Asaa should do more concepts for sportswear brands… I’m sorry… I always go on when you call after a flight...” 

“Not hearing you for 14-hours makes me want to hear you... “ Kaname laughs in reply to this, but his heavy lidded expression betrays that he's clearly ready to pass out.

“There’s nothing like our silence together,” he replies, nestling into bed. “So lucky to find someone you can be silent with and take joy in it… in any season… on any continent…” 

“... It’s a shame this trip and your schedule means today was the peak bloom,” he murmured sadly. Wakatoshi had found it troubling. Neither was sure why this felt like a black mark on them, like they had failed something they quintessentially did not understand. 

“But they always come back…” Kaname murmurs, trying to reassure. It’d been many more years than some of their peers' relationships had lasted. 

“... And so will I, my Wakatoshi.” The sentence like a psychopomp to slumber guides his eyes shut and the camera to angle towards parts of Kaname in his little nest of comforters where his skin was exposed, where Wakatoshi wanted to massage and leave kisses. 

“I love you,” he says every time to nobody. He looks beautiful in that bed, Wakatoshi thought, before tapping the red circle, leaving both of them alone. 

\--

Clink, clatter, chatter, calming chaos. Kaname doesn't mind -- he works well in peaceful environments, and what he was currently working on was dissecting one of the marketing directors for the upcoming campaign’s brain. Florals, varying degrees of realism and abstraction, to be reproduced in polypropylene, acrylic and nylon, and sold for a season. 

“For summer?” He questioned. 

“Yeah, why?”

He flipped back between two of the prints, ignoring his coffee. Chemical stimulants were mechanically fine, but didn’t hit the same way considering a problem or choice to make did. “It just seems strange. Daffodils, azaleas.. Cherry blossoms…” his voice drifts. 

“Florals do well in the summer.” 

“But those plants only bloom -- now, basically, in this hemisphere,” he argues. He gets an arm thrown around his shoulders. 

“What’s it matter? We can have those flowers whenever we want!” They laugh. “Puts some spring in their step 365-days-a-year. I’ll workshop that slogan.” 

The marketing director drinks like he must before it evaporates, but Kaname easily identifies who in the group to speak to later, distracting the company man with a diagram of the insoles that he couldn’t interpret sober, much less several mixed drinks in. He gently nods to a dark-haired woman across from him, introduced earlier as the designer of the textiles, and through the din aesthetician meets engineer.

“So why these flowers?” He asks, her expression turning.at the question. She purses her dark stained lips together for a moment like she consumed something sour.

“Let’s meet in a quieter place,” she says, finally, sliding him a business card. “English, good, yes?”

He nods, at which time the sloppy drunk spills the dregs from a champagne flute on Kaname’s sleeve. His handler who had picked him up from the airport is mortified, and is extremely apologetic regarding the boorish collaborator. The two of them eat up part of the day replacing the dress shirt at a nearby outlet -- “And an extra, just in case.” 

So Kaname continues to look unassuming and ordinary, a perfectly average Japanese man, who that evening steps into the smaller of the hotel’s two bars and thinks, what the hell, ordering a glass of whiskey he would never drink in Japan. To his left the woman he’s there to ask about the flowers finishes up a phone conversation switching between at least two languages, sometimes scolding, sometimes loving. Her family, he assumes. Her cocktail’s glass grows heavier condensation. Her own clothes are fairly normal, but when she shifts something in the threads of her jacket twinkles like stars.

“You don’t like the flowers?” she says. He shakes his head. 

“I love these -- that’s,” he struggles for a second, while she waits, “why I don’t understand them here.” 

She finally sips her drink. “You said that thing to DeMattis this morning, right? About it not making sense for summer.” 

“Yes -- I am missing the cherry blossoms back home, right now,” he said quietly, thinking of each previous year he and Wakatoshi had knotted their lives more tightly together. 

“They didn’t like my home, I guess,” she finally replies. Kaname blinks. 

“They visited you at home?” He asks. She sighs and pulls out a sketchbook, cover folded over to a page. There’s fewer colors than the florals, more judicious in their usage. The flora is as beautiful, but hardier than fragile, fleeting flowers. 

“Cactus?”

“Called nopal,” she replies. He nods, turning the page. 

“Ah -- landscapes.” 

“Anywhere like that in Japan, Mr. Moniwa?” He doesn’t bother to correct how she pronounced his name. He just continues to stare at the symmetry of a night sky and a desert, neither as empty as he ever imagined them. 

“Nowhere.” He turns another page. A whimsical pattern made out of road signs. 

“They didn’t like this?” She drops a smile she had picked up. 

“Some of them did. But not enough to make a difference. So they called up an artist, but ended up asking for a florist.” She shrugs. “It doesn’t really matter. This work is mostly just an advertisement to the world that I still exist so maybe I’ll sell a few more originals. Your career is shackled to these companies.” She takes her notebook and turns a few pages before handing it back. 

“I know I did a crummy job illustrating your home in a plant.” Kaname begins to protest but she shushes him before handing the notebook back. “But in exchange, I’ll show you mine.” It’s not a classically beautiful plant -- its scrub-like, just barely not a bush, but its coloration and spindly growth feels like flames shooting through veins. There's many of them, and the faintest impression of a mountain’s ridge beyond them where the sketch never finishes. 

“I think I like your home,” he says, and suddenly wonders at the image of dramatically rushing to the airport, a ridiculous scenario in any case and most certainly in a US airport for an international flight. But suddenly he hated Portland. He wanted to be home. Tokyo or Sendai, his mind wasn't specific, as long as he could dwell in a cherry blossom with his lover, forever. 

Behind the red trees was a woman. 

“That’s just my mom. She’s modeled for me since I was young. She has fun with it.” She studies his expression with just a hint of curiosity. The model may have been a much older woman, but the gesture sketches of ghostly graphite have a girlishness. 

“She looks… light-hearted,” he agreed after settling on a phrase with a moment of thought.

“Your mom’s more serious?” She pauses. “Sorry, I shouldn’t assume -- “ 

“You’re fine! She’s… a doctor. I hope she retires soon,” he admits. He unlocks his phone, taps a folder he’d dutifully imported each upgrade, and shows her a photo on his phone of his mother and her siblings. It’s some years old. “Mother on the far left.” The artist cradles his phone in one hand and glances up, asking permission to flip through the album. He shrugs and gestures,  _ go ahead _ .

“Brothers?” It was the year he graduated. Two other teenagers, one other also holding his diploma, flanked him. 

“Cousins,” he corrects, and she swipes forward to a slightly more raucous scene with two more children, a girl on the cusp of puberty and a gap-toothed young boy. "My sister, and other cousin.” he smiles. 

She flicks it again. Kaname gains a pensive twitch of a frown over the portrait of his father on one side, his elder brother on the other. Though it wasn't as though they weren't on speaking terms, in some ways it felt like they did the maintenance on their bond mostly for the sake of the rest of the family; his brother had taken the name of his mother's family, forging his own life. The last time he had been home with them during the holidays, Ittetsu went from eloquently tipsy waxing poetic, to icy and stern, an affectation useful in his job, when his father suggested perhaps he and Kaname could slow down on the drinks. He then took the sake from Kaname and poured it himself, serving the next round to him, then to his mother, then to his partner, then to Wakatoshi. It was a disrespectful challenge to an outsider looking in, but it was the dynamic of the détente they had come to; Thus they could continue to be family-shaped. Kaname takes another sip and studies the picture. In this photo, his younger self was clearly what welded their familial bond together, one hand on each of his shoulders, their grips firmer than his on his diploma. 

"Father and elder brother," he condenses his thoughts. The woman tactfully nods and continues. 

“Who’s this?” She thumbs forward, and progresses further through March 2013. He takes the phone from her. He had forgotten this photo existed, but never forgot the day it was taken. Both of them felt stiff and awkward after having been wrangled into yukata -- he by his mother and aunt, Wakatoshi by his dorm mates, apparently -- but eventually relaxed, and he supposed, that had been when he had captured this smile. Like a blossom in a book. A smile that always stayed.

“Wakatoshi, at the end of high school,” he says softly. Here he struggles before being plaintive. “He is my partner.”

“He must still be a handsome guy,” she interjects. She notices his jaw trembling and chooses to forget it immediately. The bar is fairly empty, but he seems as though he embarrasses easily. 

Kaname nods and mutters to himself. She fills the air to keep the space from deflating. 

“He’s waiting for you to come back?” 

“Yes, but, sometimes we pass each other by… He travels for work too. An athlete. Training, matches, so on... “ 

“It sounds rough.” 

“This is a short business trip, since my work is basically done. If they’re testing or refining a design that can take much longer. But in Tokyo, I’m just holed up in our apartment at a drafting table,” he laughs weakly. “Today we would have gone to Ueno Park for the blossoms…” He stares into the now-empty highball glass in his hand. She has a pencil in hers. 

“I only had pictures for reference. Do you feel like I just missed something about them that you can’t see the same with a lens between it and your eyes?” 

He supposes that there is some ineffable, experiential quality of them that illustrating, designing, and manufacturing struggles to meet the needs of beyond its own ends to meet people’s desires for the idea of cherry blossoms. He’s had terrible pink-dyed sweets, seen advertised viewings in parks attracting crowds and obstructing his view, years when he barely glanced at them in favor of a textbook or a computer screen. He sits for what feels like a long time considering this before deciding on his answer and speaking once more. 

“I am sorry to say,” he replies, “it is that you can’t have them in the summer.” 

She sets her pencil down and nods. They are both suddenly more conscious of how much time is inside their glasses. One thinks of the cumulative hours of labor producing the contents. The other thinks of the immeasurable patience required before it matured into something to consume. And then it’s gone. 

“I hate this city,” she says casually. “I hate most cities. The people are all right.” 

Kaname unlocks his phone and thumbs through the open gallery once more, looking for something before setting it down. It was a view over the mountains he idly had taken one day, and never felt like deleting. He had been walking to school and the sun had begun to come back once more, as it did each day, as his mother came back from work each day. It was such an old photo. 

“Miyagi,” he says. She peers over thin-framed glasses and sips her drink.

“Taos,” she replies eventually. They sit until the bartender comes over and she tries to stop him from paying for his drink until he indicates what he had ordered was costlier than the average and she demurs, laughing a little. Neither of them knows what the other’s home is but a set of words that each only have half of, and that is all they gave each other in the end. They both leave Portland earlier than they were scheduled. For the first time in years he wished once he disembarked at Narita that the flow of people would guide him to a bullet train and a window to see the suburbs rise and dissolve like a tide, before colliding with the waves of development emanating from Sendai City. And in his fantasy Wakatoshi is next to him. 

He takes a taxi. He returns to an apartment with a small balcony.

Wakatoshi is in Osaka. 

The blossoms are fading. He saw a tree by a sidewalk from the car. It had already wept most of its yearly allocation. In his mind he apologizes for neglecting them. They do not care. They are already colorless, and they are just petals, he thinks. He still raises his phone. 

He sends Deanna, the artist who wears starlight, a picture, with a question that summons a rueful smile not quite a world away. 

_ Do you think you can make the florals look like this for me someday?  _

Right after sending this a new notification pops on his phone's screen. He taps it to open his texts. 

_ Waka _

_ >Is there anything you'd like me to bring back from Osaka? _

_ Kaname _

_ >Actually, yes -- would you mind bringing something back from Flower Roll? _

_ Waka _

_ >I can stop in the morning on the way to my train back.  _

_ Kaname _

_ >I love you _

He waits for the reply

_ Waka _

_ >I love you, too. _

And he proceeds to dial his cousin, wondering why Wakatoshi couldn't call him. It was probably just a thought that passed by, so he grabbed it to send before the thought could escape him. Kaname decides that makes sense before a surprisingly husky voice picks up what should be his cousin Issei's mobile number. 

"Hello, this is Take. Issei's at work," Takehiro's voice took an edge of frustration, "Who's this?" 

“Oh, hello -- It's his cousin. Ah, cousin Moniwa, not Akaashi,” he clarifies. The voice turns friendlier. He and Takehiro knew each other fairly well, after how long Issei had been their partner. 

“Oh, Kana, hi. What’s up?” 

“Wakatoshi is in Osaka right now, and I asked him to stop by the bakery -- could you, maybe guide him towards something more likely to survive the journey? He,” Kaname pauses and gently laughs, “I think he was a bit disappointed in himself that the profiteroles were, jostled a bit on the train last time.” 

Take laughs in response and they promise that they’ll do this. They ask about Portland, and Kaname quickly defers, saying it was all right. Eventually the call ends and he sits alone at his drafting desk with a tall can from the vending a block away until it's empty, studying some cherry blossoms he picked up from in front of the machine. He spends a long time asleep, affected by the time change. He wakes up on the couch with a DVD he doesn’t remember playing stuck on the main menu, not rested, but alerted by the sound of Wakatoshi unlocking the door. Kaname’s up and ready to meet him. They talk and the box from Flower Roll is packed carefully with macarons, intact and well-formed, and they enjoy them together. But they aren’t the only thing Wakatoshi has brought back; flu season's parting gift also came along for the ride. Three days later Kaname’s palm is against his forehead after being incredulous at a thermometer’s reading, Wakatoshi’s hair clinging to sweaty, feverish skin. Kaname sleeps on the couch for two nights, but the morning of the third day finds him unable to stay away any longer, slipping his arms around a beginning-to-recover Wakatoshi in the early light of dawn. Wakatoshi can’t help but reciprocate after they already had been apart for a week, their comfort in quiet together an irresistible need. 

Two days later Kaname starts coughing and can’t keep more than the thinnest robe on without fussing at the discomfort, a small mountain of sleep and loungewear amassing at the end of the bed as each one aggravates him after a while. It’s Wakatoshi’s turn to stare at a digital display in shocked silence -- but this one is reading just shy of 41 degrees. His fever was lower, and broke by the end of the second day. Kaname’s temperature doesn’t drop below 39 for three days. He sleeps fitfully, unable, it seems, to remember the times he is awake, occasionally slurring his language when he tries to talk. He barely eats or drinks. There’s snippets he remembers later, or at least that he has ghostly impressions off. A doctor visits. At some point he hears an elusive, rare panic in Wakatoshi’s voice, punctuated by silences. A phone call?

"I understand, Dr. Moni--" from that, it sounds like it’s Kaname’s mother, but his brain stops recording.

Somebody -- did somebody come over to relieve Wakatoshi? -- helps him get to the bathroom to vomit. Despite his senses being barely operational, there’s a grossness that endures in his memory.

Two people at the door. They bring Wakatoshi groceries and Kaname well wishes. His teammates, maybe. None of these impressions feel chronologically clear. He essentially loses most of a week of his life. For years, Wakatoshi doesn’t talk about that time. Kaname has no memory of waking up at 2 am in pain, crying between coughs because he's alone and their bed is so empty just as the hotel room's bed only a week earlier was, a sharp contrast in the loneliness of heaven and hell. He doesn't remember a day in the thick of it where his throat was so sore he couldn't swallow anything. These ghastly events only truly endure in either’s memory years later is on nights Wakatoshi’s sleep schedule is disturbed by travel and he grasps around to find Kaname asleep in the dark, curled up, warm but not blood-boiling as he was during the bout of sickness. And he holds him until sunrise. 

Wakatoshi doesn’t cry, as a rule. This breaks with Kaname’s fever, finally, on the fifth day. He’s more coherent, and awake for more than a few minutes at a time, and he smiles a tight, wan smile when he sees his partner. Wakatoshi manages to not weep from relief until he’s in the kitchen, waiting for the electric kettle to warm up, wiping away any evidence of this before walking back into the bedroom. By the end of the day Kaname’s working on his laptop and Wakatoshi takes a nap, eventually tucked under a spare blanket. He looks peaceful, which makes Kaname feel peace for a second before hearing a chime from his computer.

_ Golden.Eagle.Art _

_ Did you actually make it back across the Pacific? I thought you were gonna email me more than just one photo. _

He pauses for a moment before using his webcam to take a photo, a half-hearted attempt at a smile. 

_ 茂庭 要 _

_ Eventually, but something came up.  _

_ Golden.Eagle.Art _

_ You look like you got hit by a truck, Mr. Moniwa.  _

  
  


_ 茂庭 要 _

_ Wakatoshi would also probably do better against a truck than me much as this bout of illness was easier on him.  _

_ Golden.Eagle.Art _

_ How bad was it? _

_ 茂庭 要 _

_ 41 degree fever. I cannot remember most of it truthfully.  _

_ Golden.Eagle.Art _

_ Shit.  _

_ He took care of you?  _

_ 茂庭 要 _

_ Yes. He is finally asleep. I do not think he did so for the last few days. _

_ Golden.Eagle.Art _

_ Glad he is now. _

Kaname brings up a new document and begins typing in it while clicking back and forth from corresponding with the artist from New Mexico, his mind finally cleared by the harrowing sickness. His parents and Wakatoshi’s father have already been reassured neither is on their deathbed. He’s free to think now. 

_ 茂庭 要 _

_ Neither of us have any intention to succumb to disease.  _

_ Golden.Eagle.Art _

_ Most people don’t, stranger.  _

_ Got any plans after your brush with death?  _

_ 茂庭 要 _

_ I might.  _

_ May I ask what the weather in New Mexico is like in late April? _

  
  


After a week or so of recovery, Kaname murmurs into Wakatoshi’s shoulder one morning that he wanted to ask about something today, a waking wish not intended to heard. To his surprise, Wakatoshi answers.

"Yes we can go to New Mexico during Golden Week," Wakatoshi mutters while still lost in dreamland. Kaname gawks at him and is suddenly much more alert when Wakatoshi's brain sends another message automatically.

"And I saw the itinerary and even though I don't understand your shorthand your links were intact. So I clicked one. It looks pretty there," he continues while seemingly unconscious with a somewhat surreal, sleepy variant on his more stoic tone.

"I'm sorry. My laptop was still broken. I had to send emails," Wakatoshi concludes. He proceeds to not recall any of this once alive to the world again. He asks, what else is in New Mexico besides the pretty things.

Two women and a hot sun and dry mountains and concept of a star-filled sky and a century old plane somebody dropped in an airport that will never leave it like most planes, that Deanna sent him a photo in front of as if to intrigue him -- she later truthfully says it was the first thing she saw and thought would make an engineer curious, and many homes. And paintings in Taos. And also burnished red taos.

"So far I only know the pretty things it makes," he admits finally after realizing he mostly makes coffee out of habit, because his hands need things to do. It is now cold, and he zones out until he feels the cup detangled from his fingers, and replaced by other fingers to tangle with.

  
  
  
  


“‘Sunport’?”

“It means the airport doesn’t get a lot of rain.” 

“Really?”

“I don’t know, the internet said so,” Kaname admits. 

“The internet says a lot of things,” Wakatoshi says in a way that just makes Kaname laugh a little and settle back to watching a movie with his earbuds in while his boyfriend exhaustively reads the in-flight magazine that he found that particular, novel word within. On the way back they will take the weekend and visit his father for a couple days in Southern California. But for now they land at a much smaller airport than the hulking behemoth that eats layover time like a fire eats kindling. It's hot, but it's arid. There's nothing muggy and oppressive like the chewable breeze of their previous stop. And it has that little plane Deanna intrigued Kaname with. That's where she finds them.

"Better in person?" She asks with a smile while he gives it a parting glance as they get on the elevators to the baggage claim. When they walk outside to where a gray-haired woman waits in an old car. Sounds of drums and flutes barely contained in the radio that she nods her head along to, she’s wearing massive sunglasses, like a celebrity, grinning and waving when she spots them. Deanna laughs. 

“Hope you’re ready to meet the lady from the sketchbook, she’s still got a lot of energy at 68.” 

“She seems wonderful,” Kaname answers, before remembering something in his laptop bag’s outer pocket. “I brought you something, by the way. I know you said not to bring gifts, but this is different.” He finds a card-sides piece of plastic, which she takes.

“Sakura.” 

It’s one of the ghostly blossoms he picked up the day he returned home from Portland, which he dried and pressed. There’s a small rip in one petal that looks like a healing scar in the dry format. 

Deanna smiles at it. 

“It’s pretty,” she says after a moment. “Hey ma, look at what Mr. Moniwa brought,” she calls while Wakatoshi is putting their suitcases in the back. He smiles at Kaname. 

“Ooo, what a wonderful reference!” The older woman exclaims. “May i hold it on the drive back? Mr. Moniwa, what’s the label on it say?” She points a finger dripping with silver rings to a set of kanji he wrote on the corner of the plastic with a marker.

“Oh, yes,” he says, feeling Wakatoshi’s hand wrap around his and feeling a peace he rarely has. He decides that he likes it. He decides that living for it now will make it easier when Wakatoshi is gone again. Kaname thinks about the emails for his next jobs that he sent, inquiring about a position with a company in West Africa going into the athletic shoe market. At the same time, he thinks of the sculptures done with careful welding Deanna also used as visual temptation, androids of the San Andres and replicants of the Rockies made of old cars and sheet metal, and thinks of how the only metalwork he'd done in years was tell other people how to manufacture carbon-fibre plates with shock-absorption spines. As much as it interested him, it wasn't the same as appreciating muscle memory, feelings, controlling the arc and the mathematics embodied in his hands -- just as when he was a setter. He could wonder whether his work had been a waste later, when he was alone again, when Wakatoshi was in Poland, before he came back, before he left again. For now, though, he is in New Mexico, and Wakatoshi is in New Mexico. They are together in another heart's home protected by a plant, tended to by hands whose compulsion to skill, to technique, felt free. Maybe his meteoric career was as fleeting as what the older woman asked about, done and preserved under plastic. Maybe he had wilted. He didn't mind the idea at all. Maybe he was lucky in his own way, besides to have Wakatoshi love him. Freed of the harsh spotlight the trees each March wept faster and faster under.

“I call it a ‘summer cherry blossom’.” 


End file.
